Top 10 Preferred WordPress Theme Development Frameworks

WordPress has become the most used (CMS) Content Management System on the internet. With it’s fast growth and adaptation by millions, WordPress is on everybody’s radar. WordPress give the ability of creating a stunning website to the average joe that has no knowledge in web design, css, html, and other languages. At this point and time there are thousands of free and premium themes on the web. Some theme developers base their living on creating these themes!

As crazy as that sounds, WordPress has opened a new market where developers & designers can acquire income. Some argue that WordPress themes are killing the website design profession. That may be true, however people do realise that when they purchase a theme for $30-$100 any other person can completely replicate them. So now the internet, even thou it’s a humongous place, is becoming flooded with look a like websites. One might ask how do I stay unique? Simple, by using a Theme Development Framework you are giving yourself the ability to create a truly unique design.

Today we have collected some of the best WordPress Frameworks. There are many other frameworks out there, but the following listed below are some of the best! Why are they the best? Thousands of people have downloaded them and are using it for their website/business. If you are ever stuck and in need of guidance, the support forums are present to help you out. So if you want more customization options as well as a unique design, check out the following framework to see if they will fit your needs.

The Thesis Theme framework is a premium template system for WordPress that is designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website. Over 37,534 people rely on the airtight SEO, incredible design flexibility, and lightning-fast loading times that Thesis provides.

The Whiteboard framework for WordPress is built to speed up the process of designing and developing a WordPress theme. Whiteboard does so by eliminating the time spent on a website’s generic div structure and WordPress’ back-end PHP that is common to all WordPress themes. Whiteboard also includes non-intrusive code designed to improve the overal WordPress theme in many ways, including SEO, speed, usability, and mobility.

The OnePress Community theme framework is an integrated website and forum solution for WordPress. It is, simply, a WordPress theme to serve as the foundation and framework for your web site and online community. Leveraging the powerful WordPress and phpBB projects, OnePress provides a set of features focused on helping you build and maintain your site from the inside out. With this set of tools, you can easily run your community and do so with professional presentation.

OnePress Features

Seamless integration with phpBB, complete with unified login and widgets to display forum posts on site.

The Buffet Framework is a theme framework designed not only for the theme developers who will be using the theme actions and filters to create the child themes, but also for the end users who would be able to add and remove what they want. Like most WordPress theme frameworks, the Buffet Framework utlises WordPress actions and filters to allow theme developers to add additional content without editing the templates files using the child theme concept.

Buffet Features

Search Engine Optimization – includes many SEO features such as breadcrumbs, headings, canonical URLs

Support for Microformats – compatible with some of the microformats like hAtom, hCard andXOXO

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A listing of such frameworks is interesting, really! As of reading your opening remarks with “thousands of users” I was curious why you did not include Genesis? It has one of the largest user bases and number of installations.

Also other frameworks like wp-framework or even Xtreme One (interesting layout manager) should be worth mentioning… Thanx, Dave

Have you ever explored rtPanel theme framework. Its the best theme framework for developers as it offers some wesome hooks and filters. Moreover there is a team of 20+ full time developers to offer free support.
Refer: http://rtpanel.com

All the open source CMS are developed and supported in the international design community, Now a days word press is getting more popularity among all the type of CMS, its template has the killing and professional look which stand unique among all the design. Here listed all template are very good looking and give a professional look to your website you can use this to you website also.

It’s just my opinion, but I think all of you whining that “the list is incomplete” and adding in your own personal favourites should consider that as far as I can tell, the list is made up of free/open source offerings, whereas the other’s I’ve checked (e.g. Genesis and Catalyst) you have to pay for (in the case of Genesis, a whopping $60 – sorry, but that’s ridiculous).

I have to agree with those comments on CatalystTheme. I used Genesis Framework on one of sites and quite nice, works well. However, I found Catalyst after and what a customizable framework.

I have 5 pages, each with its own layout type (so different for blog over static pages) each with different number of sidebars. I have then created custom widget hooks in head, content, footer, etc. Custom colours for most anything including separators. It truly allows for maximum customize.